Why Games Like Rogue Legacy Should Terrify Big Publishers

Rogue Legacy. Screengrab: Cellar Door Games

I was playing Rogue Legacy, the current indie-game sensation du jour that everyone else is playing, hacking my way for the umpteenth time through a randomly generated castle done up in a pixel aesthetic, when I saw someone familiar in a portrait hanging on the castle wall: the guy from Don’t Shit Your Pants.

Was Rogue Legacy in fact developed, I wondered, by the creator of Don’t Shit Your Pants, a Flash game whose vulgar premise turned out to belie a clever spin on the text adventure genre? Turned out it was indeed. This explained a lot of the humor.

Upon further reflection, I decided two things: One, Rogue Legacy is the Don’t Shit Your Pants of platform games. Two, this is the sort of indie game that should have traditional game publishers worried.

Before we talk about Rogue Legacy, we’re going to have to talk about — yes — Don’t Shit Your Pants. Although the game’s creator jokingly refers to it as “survival horror,” in reality it’s in the genre of text parser adventure game — think King’s Quest before the invention of the mouse. To solve the game’s puzzles you have to type commands such as “look around,” “open door” and “shit.” (The latter won’t get you anywhere in King’s Quest but is crucial here.)

At a conceptual level, Don’t Shit Your Pants humorously plays off the grandiose goals of most videogame plots. You don’t need to do anything so taxing as save a princess, fight God or end a zombie outbreak. All you have to do to win is not shit your pants. Can you manage that? The first time you play, you may fail, and you will not feel so smart. But it won’t take more than a couple of tries before you successfully manage to not defecate inside your clothing. Congratulations!

But that’s where the game begins. Not befouling your trousers earns you an achievement, and a glimpse at the achievements screen — where you can see that there are actually 10 more trophies yet to be earned. How can you find 10 more unique endings, in an adventure game that only has a single room and only two objects with which you can interact? This encourages you to start thinking outside the box as far as what commands you enter into the parser, and you’re often rewarded with very funny scenes when you hit on something correct.

So Don’t Shit Your Pants seems initially like a micro-sized game, but through cleverly encouraging repeated replays, it provides more entertainment than a game of its scope otherwise would. (By which I mean maybe 20 minutes versus two seconds. I don’t want to oversell it.)

Don’t Shit Your Pants. Screengrab: Wired

Rogue Legacy uses the same strategy. The gameplay itself is closest in form to the Castlevania series — you explore a castle of interconnected rooms, fighting enemies, picking up gold and other items. But if Rogue Legacy was truly a Castlevania game it would be over in under an hour and be a deeply disappointing waste of money, because the castle itself is very small.

So what Rogue Legacy does instead is to rejigger the gameplay to make the absolute most out of that small amount of content. To do this it borrows, as the name suggests, from the roguelike genre: The first time you enter the castle, you will die pretty much immediately. But you can use whatever gold you found to buy upgrades that make you stronger, and the next time you go in you’ll get a little bit farther, and a little bit farther, etc. To add even more variety to each replay, the castle is randomly generated: There’s a large list of hand-designed rooms, but they’re joined together in a different arrangement every time. So you never know what’s around the next corner.

This doesn’t mean that it’s easy to take a tiny Castlevania and turn it into a Rogue Legacy. Since your character can be one of many different classes and have a variety of traits, there’s a lot of gameplay balancing that must be done to make sure everything works properly. But adding options for tweaking character stats is less time-consuming and therefore less expensive than creating entire new levels, art, and enemies to extend the life of a game.

So why should Rogue Legacy be causing makers of big-budget games to — if you will pardon the expression — shit their pants?

We’re currently in the middle of the Steam Summer Sale, in which games on Valve’s digital distribution platform are selling for highly discounted prices. As I write this you can buy Deus Ex: Human Revolution for $3 and Saints Row the Third for $5. But Steam is an even playing field, or about as even as the game industry has ever gotten. And right next to these triple-A blockbusters you can find indie games like Bastion and Fez and even indie-r games like Time Gentlemen, Please! and Rogue Legacy.

Getting games onto physical retail shelves is an insurmountable hurdle for all but the largest corporations, but a wide variety of indie developers can get access to the Steam store, just as they can with the Wii U eShop and the PlayStation Store. (If Microsoft ever changes its stance on self-publishing, the same could be true of the Xbox One digital game store as well.) As we shift more and more to buying games digitally, we’ll more and more encounter these even playing fields where Activision and some dude in his garage have their games sitting side by side on the digital “shelf.”

Activision (e.g.) still has the advantage in this scenario, because it can spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create brand awareness. So when a Steam user has to click “Buy Now,” there’s more chance they’ll go for what’s already familiar. But that’s changing, too, as more players find out about new games not from TV ads but from social media, Let’s Play videos, etc.

Through clever design, Rogue Legacy can take a small, inexpensively made game and turn it into a 100-hour Skyrim-scale experience. That’s a threat to the Skyrims of the world. If you’re doing triple-A, the way you add gameplay time is to build more levels, more enemies, more everything. And even if games stay the same size, your costs increase because you must also make sure the graphic quality of those games continues to increase over time.

Meanwhile, Rogue Legacy and games like it can have a development cost that’s a fraction of a percent of your typical triple-A game’s, pass those savings along to the player, then give them the same amount of gameplay time.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.